SCIENCE OF THE MONTH: JULY 2015

Credit: http://www.gettyimages.co.uk

1 July 2015: India has begun an exploration for mineral deposits and precious metals like Gold and Silver in the Southern Indian Ocean. The country's first ever seabed exploration for Polymetallic Sulphides is being done in the Rodriguez Triple Junction (RTJ), a geological junction in the southern Indian Ocean where three tectonic plates meet near Mauritius. India has been granted 10,000sq km near RTJ for the exploration of Polymetallic Sulphide, a mineral deposit with Copper, Iron and Lead in commercial quantities and Gold and Silver in lesser quantities. National Institute of Ocean Technology (NIOT) and National Centre for Antarctic and Ocean Research (NCAOR) will jointly take up the exploration soon. Link: http://www.ncaor.gov.in  

2 July 2015: The Solar Impulse plane has broken the record for the longest non-stop solo flight without refuelling. The milestone was achieved 76 hours into the latest leg of its attempt to circumnavigate the globe. Pilot Andre Borschberg is making steady progress as he attempts the first solar-powered crossing of the Pacific. He has now broken the record for the longest ever non-stop solo flight without refuelling. The previous mark was set by the American Steve Fossett in 2006. His jet-powered Virgin GlobalFlyer completed a full circumnavigation travelling more than 41,000km. Solar Impulse has 17,000 photovoltaic cells which is used to charge its lithium-ion batteries to sustain the plane during night. Link: http://www.solarimpulse.com  

3 July 2015: Amidst raging controversy whether rice originated in India or China, data generated by a DNA chip developed for fingerprinting of rice by Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) has indicated that Aus and Aman (Indica), the two most important rice varieties were first domesticated in the Indian subcontinent. The ICAR scientists faced the challenge of designing their own DNA chip as the only other such chip developed by the Cornell University, was not available for research in India. The ICAR rice chip will help identify new useful genes to face the challenge of growing population and climate change. A patent has been filed for the chip and the work is published in Nature Scientific Reports. Link: http://www.nature.com

4 July 2015: Kamal Bawa, India's most prominent biologist and an evolutionary ecologist, has been elected to the prestigious Royal Society in recognition of his pioneering contributions in the area of conservation science. As per Royal Society,  Bawa's pioneering contributions to understanding the population biology of tropical forest trees led to new strategies for their conservation and also for the sustainable use of non-timber forest products. Bawa is the second University of Massachusetts faculty member to be elected a fellow of the Royal Society after Roger Davis, who teaches in the program in Molecular Medicine. Established in 1660, each year the London-based Royal Society proposes commonwealth fellowships including 10 foreign fellows. Link: https://royalsociety.org

5 July 2015: Professor of Biology Sanjeev Galande at the Indian Institute of Science, Education and Research (IISER), Pune, has been selected for the GD Birla Award for Scientific Research for 2014. The award comprises a cash award of Rs 2.5 lakh. The award was instituted 25 years ago by the KK Birla Foundation to recognise the contributions of scientists aged below 50 years, who are working and living in India. Galande, a team leader of Centre of Excellence in Epigenetics at IISER, is the only third Puneite to receive this award after Raghunath Mashelkar, who received the award in 1993 and Thanu Padmanabhan in 2003. Galande is also a recipient of Shantiswaroop Bhatnagar award. Born in 1967, Galande obtained his PhD in biochemistry from Indian Institute of Science. Link: http://www.kkbirlafoundation.org

6 July 2015: NASA has unveiled a boomerang-shaped aircraft that could be the first to take flight on Mars to look for potential landing sites for future manned mission to the red planet. A prototype of the Preliminary Research Aerodynamic Design to Land on Mars, or Prandtl-m, which is a flying wing aircraft with a twist, is planned to be ready for launch from a high altitude balloon later this year. The Prandtl-m will be released at about at 100,000 feet altitude, which will simulate the flight conditions of the Martian atmosphere. Once in the Martian atmosphere, the Prandtl-m would emerge from its host, deploy itself and begin its mission. The Prandtl-m aircraft would be gliding for the last 2,000 feet to the surface of Mars and would have a range of about 20 miles. Link: http://www.nasa.gov

7 July 2015: In the heaviest ever commercial mission undertaken by ISRO and its commercial arm Antrix, the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) will put in orbit five foreign satellites from the spaceport of Sriharikota in Andhra Pradesh on July 10. With the overall lift-off mass of the five satellites amounting to about 1,440 kg, this mission becomes the heaviest commercial mission ever undertaken by Antrix/ISRO. In its 13th flight, PSLV-C28 will launch three identical DMC3 optical earth observation satellites built by Surrey Satellite Technology Limited, UK. The three DMC3 satellites, each weighing 447 kg, will be launched into a 647 km Sun-Synchronous Orbit using the latest version of  PSLV-C28 in 'XL' configuration. It will be the ninth flight of PSLV-C28.Link: http://www.isro.gov.in 


8 July 2015:After temporarily halting data collection in its nearly 17-mile ring, CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator credited with the discovery of the 'God particle' in 2012, is back to doing what it does best, colliding proton beams. At present, 152 bunches of protons are circulating in each direction in the 27 kilometer machine, but the goal is to increase the number of protons over the next two weeks to close to 1,000 bunches per beam. Restarted for 'Season 2' early in June, it was shut down briefly so that residual gas molecules trapped on the surface of the walls of the beam pipes could be removed. Now, after the cleaning, the collider is functioning at its record-breaking energy of 13 teraelectronvolts. Link: http://home.web.cern.ch

9 July 2015: NASA has selected four astronauts who will fly on private spcae capsules built by SpaceX and Boeing. Each astronaut has test pilot experience and has flown twice in space. The astronauts are: Air Force Col. Robert Behnken, until recently head of the astronaut office; Air Force Col. Eric Boe, part of shuttle Discovery's last crew; retired Marine Col. Douglas Hurley, pilot of the final shuttle crew; and Navy Capt. Sunita Williams, a two-time resident of the International Space Station. Sunitha is of Indian ethinicity, and the world record-holder for most spacewalking time by a woman. It will be the first launch of astronauts from Cape Canaveral, Florida, since the space shuttles retired in 2011. Till now NASA has been paying Russia to ferry astronauts. Link: https://blogs.nasa.gov

10 July 2015: In the heaviest ever commercial mission undertaken, ISRO and its commercial arm Antrix, has launched five foreign satellites from the spaceport of Sriharikota in Andhra Pradesh, using the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) today at 9.58 p.m. With the overall lift-off mass of the five satellites amounting to about 1,440 kg, this mission becomes the heaviest commercial mission ever undertaken by Antrix/ISRO. In its 13th flight, PSLV-C28 will launch three identical DMC3 optical earth observation satellites built by Surrey Satellite Technology Limited, UK. The three DMC3 satellites, each weighing 447 kg, will be launched into a 647 km Sun-Synchronous Orbit using the latest version of  PSLV-C28 in 'XL' configuration. It will be the ninth flight of PSLV-C28. Link: http://www.isro.gov.in 


11 July 2015: Government of India observed National Fish Farmers’ Day. It was in 2001 that the Government of India declared July 10 as Fish Farmers Day to commemorate the first ever successful induced breeding of Carp fishes by Dr H L Chaudhury and Dr K H Alikunhi. This discovery is heralded as a landmark achievement in development of fisheries in India. The pioneering work was carried out by the Pond Culture Division, Cuttack under the administrative control of Central Inland Fisheries Research Institute. Prior to this discovery farmers used to collect fish seed from riverine sources. Induced breeding technology has enabled the fish farmers get fish seed of right species at right time. A plaque is there at pond in Cuttack where breeding experiments were done. Link: http://www.dcfr.res.in  

12 July 2015: Kerala State Biodiversity Board is planning to build a National Biodiversity Garden and Folklore Centre at Munnar, one of the tourist destinations of Kerala. The Kerala Small Industries Development Corporation Ltd (SIDCO) has been asked to prepare a detailed report on proposed the project, which would come near Kundala dam in Munnar. The biodiversity garden is envisaged as a storehouse of species in the Western Ghats and a showcase for the public. The Western Ghats houses about 27 per cent of the 4,000 plant species found in India, Kerala Forest Department data shows. Most of them are endemic to the Western Ghats. The project report will be submitted before the National Biodiversity Authority in four months. The National Biodiversity Authority has already approved the project. Link: http://nbaindia.org  

13 July 2015: A new particle called the pentaquark has been discovered by scientists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The previously unseen class of particle was first predicted to exist in the 1960s but has eluded physicists until now. It was detected by CERN's Large Hadron Collider 'beauty' (LHCb) experiment at the LHC in Switzerland. The Large Hadron Collider beauty (LHCb) experiment specialises in investigating the slight differences between matter and antimatter by studying a type of particle called the beauty quark, or b quark. The pentaquark represents a way to aggregate quarks, the fundamental constituents of protons and neutrons, in a pattern that has never been observed since fifty years. The findings have been submitted to the journal Physical Review Letters.Link: http://arxiv.org 

14 July 2015: NASA's New Horizons probe, after traveling over 4.8 billion km, flew past the mysterious dwarf planet Pluto at a distance of about 12,500 km at around 5 p.m.on the outermost fringes of the solar system. The probe, launched a decade ago, is expected to beam back some key images of Pluto's surface to Earth. The images will also help scientists explore the mysterious Kuiper Belt, the planetary debris left over during the formation of the solar system about 4.5 billion years ago. On board the New Horizons is the ashes of Clyde Tombaugh, the astronomer who discovered Pluto in 1930. Earlier, the New Horizons have found Pluto to be 2,370 km in diameter, somewhat larger than many prior estimates. The result confirms that Pluto is larger than all other known solar system objects beyond the orbit of Neptune. Link: https://www.nasa.gov  

15 July 2015: Today marked the 50th anniversary of the first photos of Mars which were beamed back to earth on 15th July 1965. This was the year that Mariner 4 became the first successful flyby mission to Mars, gaining historic ground where other attempts had failed by capturing the first images of the planet. The historic spacecraft managed to record 21 images as it flew by at a distance of around 6,000 miles. It carried a television camera and six other science instruments to study the Martian atmosphere and surface, including a data recorder which saved the day. There were more than 70 clearly distinguishable craters ranging in diameter from four to 120 km. The first photos from Mars showed the Atlantis region and the crater that was named after the Mariner 4 mission. Link: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov    

16 July 2015: Today marked 70 years since the world’s first successful atomic bomb test as part of the top-secret World War II program, the Manhattan Project. On July 16, 1945, US Army detonated the world’s first nuclear weapon in New Mexico’s Jornada del Muerto desert as part of the top secret 'Trinity test'.  This event was the brainchild from the secret laboratory in Los Alamos, which housed an extraordinary mix of people, from some of the most brilliant and noteworthy physicists of the 20th century to soldiers and military intelligence agents. In a blink of an eye, the nuclear explosion unleashed the energy of approximately 20,000 tons of TNT. The sand underneath the bomb melted to form a greenish radioactive form of glass which was given the name: Trinitite. Link: http://www.lanl.gov

17 July, 2015: The unusually warm weather that was experienced across most parts of the world, makes 2014 the hottest year in recorded history, said a report based on contributions from 413 scientists from 58 countries around the world. Several markers of climate change such as rising land and ocean temperature, sea levels and greenhouse gases set new records in 2014, the fifth warmest year since national records began in 1901, the findings showed. Major Greenhouse Gas concentrations continued to rise during 2014, reaching record values. The global average sea surface temperature was the highest on record in 2014 and so was global sea level rise. The report titled 'State of the Climate in 2014' is published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. Link: https://www2.ametsoc.org   

18 July, 2015: China has started assembling the world's largest Radio Telescope. The Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope (FAST) nestles in a bowl-shaped valley between hills in the southwestern province of Guizhou. FAST will be the world's largest single-aperture telescope, it said, overtaking the Arecibo Observatory in the US territory of Puerto Rico, which is 305 metres (1000 feet) in diameter. FAST has got a 500 m aperture. The dish will have a perimeter of about 1.6 kilometres, and there are no towns within five kilometres, giving it ideal surroundings to listen for signals from space. China has plans for a permanent orbiting station by 2020 and eventually to send a human to the moon. Construction on the telescope started in March 2011 and is scheduled to finish next year. Link: http://arxiv.org  

19 July, 2015: After the Mars Orbiter Mission, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) is now planing a mission to Venus and asteroids. Venus has many scientific challenges and aspects that need to be studied. Exploring an asteroid is also challenging task. ISRO had announced that it is targeting up to 10 launches a year by 2016. India's last planetary mission, the Mars Orbiter Mission was launched on 5 November, 2013 and went into Mars orbit on 24 September, 2014. The Mars mission team won the prestigious 2015 Space Pioneer Award in the science and engineering category in recognition of achieving the rare feat in its very first attempt. Given India's success with the Mars mission, here's hoping the Venus mission too will see the same results.Link: http://indianspacestation.com

20 July, 2015: Fossil-fuel emissions are not only messing with our future, but they are also messing with our ability to accurately date the past. An analysis by Heather Graven, a climate-physics researcher at Imperial College London, finds that fossil-fuel emissions could impact radiocarbon dating. Fossil fuels like coal and oil are so old that they contain no Carbon-14. When their emissions mix with the modern atmosphere, they flood it with non-radioactive carbon. However, this is not the first time that carbon-14 levels have changed in the history of the world. The fraction of carbon-14 in the atmosphere decreased after the Industrial Revolution with the rise of fossil fuel combustion. But in the 1950s and 60s, nuclear weapons testing caused a sharp increase. Link: http://www.biogeosciences.net

21 July, 2015: The genome of the endangered Kiwi bird is identified. The genetic changes reflect the bird's adaptation to nocturnal life. An international team led by Torsten Schoneberg of the Institute of Biochemistry of the Medical Faculty at the University of Leipzig and Janet Kelso of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology has now sequenced the genome of the Brown Kiwi (Apteryx mantelli). Researchers found several genes involved in colour vision to be inactivated and the diversity of odourant receptors higher than other birds. The kiwi, national symbol of New Zealand, is with genetic changes towards adaptations that happened about 35 million years ago which was after the Kiwi's arrival in New Zealand. The study is published in Genome Biology.Link: http://www.genomebiology.com

22 July, 2015: Peter Higgs won the world's oldest scientific prize, the Royal Society's Copley Medal, for his pioneering work on the theory of the Higgs boson. Higgs received the Medal for his fundamental contribution to Particle Physics with his theory explaining the origin of mass in elementary particles. The existence of the Higgs boson was confirmed by two experiments carried out at the Large Hadron Collider in 2012. Higgs also shared the Nobel Prize for Physics in the year 2013. The Copley Medal was first awarded by the Royal Society in 1731, 170 years before the first Nobel Prize. It has been awarded to eminent scientists like Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein, Stephen Hawking, Alec Jeffreys (the pioneer in DNA Fingerprinting technology) etc. Link: https://royalsociety.org
 
23 July, 2015: A new plant species has become the first species to be ‘discovered’ on a social media platform, the Facebook. The experts at the Bavarian State Collection for Botany in Munich have identified it to be a plant belonging to the family of Sundews. They have named it as Drosera magnifica which means 'magnificent sundew'. The initial photo of this new plant species was taken in Minas Gerais, South-Eastern Brazil and was uploaded by an amateur researcher named Reginaldo Vasconcelos. He spotted the plant in 2013 on top of the mountain, photographed it and posted it on Facebook to amuse his friends. Drosera magnifica is said to be a huge carnivorous plant which is the second-largest carnivorous plant in the Americas. The finding is published in Phytotaxa. Link: http://www.mapress.com 

24 July, 2015: It was July 1965 when Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson were struggling to explain strange signal noise being picked up by the Bell Labs Holmdel horn radio antenna. They thought at first those damn pigeons were back nesting inside the antenna’s chamber, but no, they had successfully chased the birds away. The noise Penzias and Wilson were hearing was actually one of the most important cosmological discoveries, the 'microwave whisper' of the Big Bang, that indicate the origin of the Universe. Penzias and Wilson weren’t even looking for the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) when they found it. Penzias and Wilson quickly published their findings. The detection of the Cosmic Microwave Background offered the first tangible evidence of the Big Bang. In 1978 Penzias and Wilson were awarded Nobel Prize in Physics. Link: http://physics.princeton.edu 

25 July, 2015: World’s largest flower, Amorphophallus titanum, blooms in Tokyo after 5 years.  This flower that blooms extremely rarely has done so in Jindai Botinaical Gardens in Chofu, Japan and has attracted hundreds of visitors to the garden forcing it to extend its opening hours. Unlike other flowers which produce a sweet smell, this rare flower has a very foul smelling odour and hence is called the 'Corpse Flower' as well. It is believed that the smell of the flower can be compared to that of rotting meat which helps to attract pollinators such as flies and beetles. This plant is native of rainforests in Western Sumatara, Indonesia. The plant is classified as a ‘vulnerable’ by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). Link: http://www.kew.org  

26 July, 2015: Insat-3D, India's Advanced Weather Satellite, has completed two successful years in orbit, according to Indian Space Research Organisation. Insat-3D is an exclusive mission designed for enhanced meteorological observations and monitoring of land and ocean surfaces for weather forecasting and disaster warning.  The satellite was launched by European rocket Ariane VA214 flight from French Guyana on July 26, 2013. Insat-3D is the first Indian geostationary satellite, equipped with sounder instrument that provides frequent good quality atmospheric profiles (temperature, humidity) over the Indian land mass and adjoining areas, it added. The main objective of the Insat-3D mission is to provide high quality observations for monitoring and prediction of weather and climate. Link: http://www.isro.gov.in 

27 July, 2015: Scientists have identified glacier-like ice on Pluto's surface from the latest set of data and images sent back from the New Horizons spacecraft. In the Sputnik Planum, which is located at the center of Pluto's 'heart', the region known as Tombaugh Region, a sheet of ice seems to have flowed and could still be flowing similarly to glaciers on Earth, suggesting signs of recent geologic activity. Scientists have only found similar surfaces on Earth and Mars. Data also show the presence of nitrogen, methane and carbon monoxide ice at the center of Sputnik Planum. The New Horizons team also showed a simulated flyover of Pluto's recently discovered mountain range, named Hillary Montes, which honors Edmund Hillary, who was one of the first climbers to reach the peak of Mount Everest.Link: https://www.nasa.gov 

28 July 2015: Today was World Hepatitis Day. As per the recently released WHO report, Hepatitis related deaths are not reported to a central agency in India. And hence the government does not have any concrete data on the number of cases and hepatitis related deaths every year. Taking one step ahead in this direction, leading gastroenterologists of the country have decided to start an online data registry detailing the rising number of Hepatitis patients.  The aim of this registry is to record the number of people suffering from Hepatitis and other liver diseases caused by it in the country. The registry will also be a part of the newly formed Indian National Association for Study of Liver and Current Perspective in Liver Disease constituted by the leading gastroenterologists of the country. Link: http://www.who.int

29 July, 2015: Dr Suniti Solomon, the Indian woman scientist, who documented the first evidence of the HIV infection in India in 1986 and one who successfully led research into the treatment of the deadly virus, passed away at her residence in Chennai. Dr Suniti and her colleagues found out the first evidence of the HIV infection in India in 1986 when blood samples of six commercial sex workers staying in a government home were tested positive. The samples were first sent to Christian Medical College in Vellore and later to a facility in the USA, where they tested HIV positive. In 2009, the Ministry of Science and Technology conferred the 'National Women Bio-scientist Award' to Dr Suniti Solomon. She also bagged the Mother Teresa Memorial Award for education and humanitarian services. Link: http://www.yrgcare.org

30 July, 2015: NASA announced that its Kepler space telescope has discovered a planet with the most similarities to Earth of any that have been discovered. And at six billion years old, the new planet, Kepler-452b, has been wearing the look for much longer. NASA scientists use the word 'Earth 2.0' to describe the planet, due to the many similarities. It orbits the same type of star as Earth, although it’s a bit warmer due to being slightly older. It’s also in the habitable zone of its star, allowing water to exist on the surface without vaporizing or freezing. And it has a similar orbit to Earth, making a year there about 385 days long. But there are still many differences between the worlds. Kepler-452b has been around since 1.5 billion years before our sun began to shine and it is 60 percent larger than Earth. Link: http://www.nasa.gov

31 July, 2015: The chemical element Lithium has been found for the first time in material ejected by a nova. Observations of Nova Centauri 2013 made using telescopes at ESO’s La Silla Observatory, and near Santiago in Chile, help to explain the mystery of why many young stars seem to have more of this chemical element than expected. The light chemical element Lithium is one of the few elements that is predicted to have been created by the Big Bang, 13.8 billion years ago.The mass of ejected Lithium in Nova Centauri 2013 is estimated to be tiny (less than a billionth of the mass of the Sun), but, as there have been many billions of novae in the history of the Milky Way, this is enough to explain the observed and unexpectedly large amounts of lithium in our galaxy. Link: http://www.eso.org